Benefits of Good Teachers Last Long Beyond Primary School

The quality of a primary school teacher can have a long-lasting impact on students on characteristics ranging from college attendance to their savings rate, according to research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Associated Press

Researchers Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman and Jonah E. Rockoff found that students assigned to high “value-added” teachers, as measured by the teachers’ impacts on their students test scores, in grades 4 to 8 were more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in higher socioeconomic status neighborhoods and have higher savings rates. The researchers also found that these students were less likely to have children as teenagers.

In a paper published earlier this year, the researchers found that existing value-added measures, a hotly-debated approach, are a good proxy for a teacher’s ability to raise students’ test scores. Their latest paper indicates that the same value-added metrics are also informative of teachers’ long-term impacts. But the researchers noted that the most important take away from their study is that improving the quality of teaching, whether through value-added metrics or not, is likely to have wide economic and social benefits for students.

Using school district records from a large urban school district and federal income tax returns, the researchers tracked approximately one million individuals from early elementary school to early adulthood, measuring outcomes such as earnings, college attendance and teenage births.

Among their findings, the researchers reported that a one standard deviation improvement in teacher value-add in a single grade raises the probability of college attendance at age 20 by 0.82 percentage points. Improvements in teacher quality also increased the quality of colleges that students attend, as measured by the average earnings of previous graduates of that college, according to the research.

Additionally, students who were assigned higher value-added teachers have steeper earnings trajectories in their 20s. The researchers found that a one standard deviation improvement in teacher value-add in a single grade on average raises students’ earnings by 1.3% at age 28 (a lifetime gain of about $39,000 on average). Furthermore, replacing a teacher whose value-add is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher increases the present value of students’ lifetime income by about $250,000 per classroom.

“Whether or not VA is ultimately used as a policy tool, our results show that parents should place great value on having their child in the classroom of a high value-added teacher,” the researchers wrote.

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